The growing complexity of cloud infrastructures in the banking sector poses new challenges for security and budgets. To transition to proactive control, financial institutions are adopting Platform Engineering and Internal Developer Platforms (IDP).
Cost optimization and platform development forecasts
Rapid digitalization often leads to overprovisioning of cloud resources and uncontrolled cost growth. To address this issue, banks are adopting FinOps practices that combine financial control with engineering expertise.
According to Gartner forecasts, by the end of 2026, about 80% of large software engineering organizations will have established Platform Engineering teams (up from 45% in 2022). This approach enables a shift-down concept, where infrastructure requirements and security standards are built directly into the platform, freeing developers from routine tasks.
Benefits of implementing IDPs in the financial sector
An Internal Developer Platform (IDP) is a practical platform engineering tool that provides developers with a single point of access to software design, testing, and deployment tools. For the banking sector, this delivers the following benefits:
- Reduced time-to-market: using standardized templates accelerates product launches.
- Security by default: integrating security policies and access control directly into development processes.
- Compliance: simplifying audits through centralized logging.
- Cost control: automatic detection of inefficient cloud configurations.
An example of effective IDP use is centralizing access to distributed customer data through standardized APIs with automatic masking of personal data in test environments.
The role of AI and readiness for change
Integrating artificial intelligence into platform solutions enables automated anomaly and threat detection, workload forecasting for cost optimization, and accelerated boilerplate code generation.
Industry implications
The transition to Platform Engineering will reshape the financial sector by standardizing development, reducing cloud overprovisioning, and automating security compliance. With Gartner predicting 80% adoption by 2026, banks that fail to implement IDPs risk falling behind in time-to-market speed and operational efficiency.
What to do
To successfully adopt platform engineering and optimize cloud costs, financial institutions should take the following practical steps:
- Conduct a preliminary audit of existing cloud resources.
- Establish a dedicated Platform Engineering team.
- Adopt FinOps practices to merge financial control with engineering expertise.
- Continuously gather feedback from software engineers to improve the platform.
Prepared by a Software Ukraine member. Original publication.